If the dead had powers of persuasion, they would have convinced the leadership of Pakistan and India that it is time to stop killing and start living. In more than five decades of independence from British rule, millions have died from rioting, war and terrorism. Can India and Pakistan ever be friends? Or, if that is too far-fetched, can leaders of the two eye-balling, nuclear missile-rattling neighbours let the people of both countries get on with generating jobs, making money and living better?

India and Pakistan

OTHER STORIES RELATED TO INDIA AND PAKISTAN The Ultimate Face-off The Fractured Road to Peace

The answer, amazingly, is yes, but with caveats that would keep a posse of policymakers busy for years. It will also require action backed by true grit, courage and enormous leaps of faith from both Indian and Pakistani establishments and the people of the two nations. Such an approach will also have to override military and political careers that are built on either side by the propagation of the theory of the evil empire.

Controversy

THE PEACE OPTIONS « ONE: Work towards a standstill agreement in Kashmir. Begin with confidence-building measures; increase interaction among ground-zero troops; hold regular meetings between the Indian and Pakistani director-generals of military operations. Follow up with activity freeze on the Line of Control, Siachen Glacier and Sir Creek. « TWO: Sign a no-war pact and a formal agreement on nuclear restraint, which is monitored internationally. « THREE: Accept the Line of Control as the de facto border between India and Pakistan. This idea has been resisted by Pakistan. « FOUR: Work a swap deal for territory in Kashmir to address mutual concerns. India backs off from the Saltoro Ridge in the Siachen Glacier area, allowing Pakistan breathing room and to maintain unhindered its strategic road link with China. In turn India demands strategic territory for safeguarding its own concerns in the Akhnoor-Chamb sector in Jammu, especially the vulnerable "Chicken Neck" region that Pakistan can throttle to cut links between the plains and the Kashmir valley and, by extension, the Kargil region and Ladakh. Or, declare a ceasefire in Siachen and withdraw troops. « FIVE: Accept that Kashmir is a problem that won't go away, is a major international concern and accept mediation by a third party. « SIX: Trifurcate Jammu and Kashmir into the Jammu, Ladakh and Kashmir regions to contain the problem. « SEVEN: Hold a plebiscite in the Kashmir Valley, giving people a choice between staying with India or opting for Pakistan. READERS DECIDE In an exclusive reader's poll in this issue, INDIA TODAY gives you an opportunity to decide the most appropriate course of action for India. And alongside, win prizes for your participation. So make a choice- and make a difference.

The possible-though by no means exhaustive-ways ahead have been articulated in private and public by India's top policymakers and diplomatic hands. They range from an immediate "standstill" agreement along the border (see box: "The Peace Options") to an internationally monitored agreement on nuclear restraint, and accepting the Line of Control (loc) as the border to trading territory.

This is where it gets very tricky, as India and Pakistan's history of creation and conflict combined with present-day realpolitik makes movement forward deeply hazardous for the health of any leadership. "No government can survive if it takes an unorthodox step," says J.N. Dixit, former foreign secretary and author of the recently published India-Pakistan: In War & Peace. Yet that is precisely what a prime minister-or President-of India and Pakistan needs to do.

However, Pakistan's leadership, for its part, has shown little real indication that it means what it says. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's sweeping statement on January 12, when he publicly decried terrorism, was followed by arrests of about 2,000 extremists and their leaders. But in less than two months they were all free, operating under a different identity (Lashkar-e-Toiba became Al Dawa, for instance) or relocating from areas in Pakistan's Punjab to Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (PoK)-or Azad Kashmir as it is officially known in Pakistan. Even after the "de-escalation" there is no sign of stemming the terrorist flow into India, either from Pakistani territory or through its sponsored cohorts in Nepal, Bangladesh and breakaway groups in India's north-east.

While the government of India needs to score points to ensure that active democracy finds a foothold in the state, India's leadership appears convinced that Pakistan will hinder elections in Jammu and Kashmir at any cost. As a first salvo, moderate Kashmiri leader Abdul Ghani Lone was killed in May and terrorists attacked families of army personnel in Jammu's Kaluchak area the same month. In recent weeks, pilgrims to Amarnath have been killed by terrorists.

Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, for his part, had pushed hard-and too fast, as the criticism among quarters in the BJP had it-for a relationship based on equanimity with his bus trip to Lahore in February 1999. Incredible as it may seem now, then Pakistani prime minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif and Vajpayee actually inked a document, the Lahore Declaration, which included three key points: that India and Pakistan

"shall intensify their efforts to resolve all issues, including the issue of Jammu and Kashmir;

"shall take immediate steps for reducing the risk of accidental or unauthorised use of nuclear weapons and discuss concepts and doctrines with a view to elaborating measures for confidence building in the nuclear and conventional fields, aimed at prevention of conflict;

"reaffirm their condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations and their determination to combat this menace."

That hopeful window to a new millennium was followed by the bloodiest overt war India and Pakistan have fought since 1971, after Pakistani intruders and army regulars crossed the loc and dug in. Sharif was toppled by Kargil-architect Musharraf, and the Agra summit between Vajpayee and Musharraf followed in July 2001. Scant weeks before 9/11, it ended up being another opportunity for polemics, rhetoric and one-upmanship. Musharraf, the practitioner of Islamic terror as an instrument of state, left Agra without the Indian and Pakistani delegations being able to work out the Agra Declaration. The stickiest issue: cross-border terrorism.

The US and UK are now increasingly pressuring Musharraf to put his money where his mouth is by choking the financial, intelligence and political pipeline to the jehadi groups. Not just turned off against India, but turned off-period. However, Musharraf has to battle his own conditioning and the conditioning of his nation, and this is something that India will need to understand and address before any meaningful progress is made. While he balances the West, the fact is that Musharraf is forced to try and stare down India without backing off from Pakistan's traditional stand over Kashmir-or he faces alienation from Pakistan's far right, and attacks from terrorist or jehadi ire now turned inward.

Whatever India's position and passion towards Kashmir being an integral part of India-reiterated by a unanimous parliamentary resolution in 1994-hasn't moved Pakistan's public opinion an inch over what it believes is its rightful claim. In the same way Indian maps show PoK and Shakshgam Valley in the Aksai Chin area as integral parts of India, Pakistani maps show all of Jammu and Kashmir, except the portion it acceded to China in 1963, as Pakistani dominion.

Kashmir, and Pakistan's idea of itself, lies at the core of the India-Pakistan conflict. In August 1951, Dr Zakir Hussain, India's future President, and other prominent Muslim intellectuals wrote in a memorandum to Frank P. Graham, United Nations Representative:

"Pakistan claims Kashmir, first, on the ground of the majority of the state's people being Muslims and, secondly, on the ground of the state being essential to its economy and defence. To achieve its objective it has been threatening to launch 'Jehad' against Kashmir in India ...

"Pakistan's policy in general and her attitude towards Kashmir in particular thus tend to create conditions in this country which in the long run can only bring to us Muslims widespread suffering and destruction. Its policy prevents us from settling down, from being honourable citizens of a state, free from suspicion of our fellow-countrymen and adapting ourselves to changing conditions to promote the interests and welfare of India. Its sabre-rattling interferes with its own economy and ours..."

As if to illustrate this telling blueprint, the regimes of Pakistan and the country's far right have over the years displayed various counts of deep-rooted complexes and sense of conflict brought on by territorial inadequacy (that a largely Muslim Kashmir opted to be with India), the breaking away of East Pakistan into Bangladesh, and wars that have always led to defeat. It has stunted nation-building, ravaged the economy and kept hardliners politically active as administrations since Zia-ul-Haq's martial law regime in 1977 cut deals with Islamic hardliners to consolidate power.

Pakistan has neatly circumvented the 1948 UN Security Council Resolution that calls for a withdrawal of Pakistani nationals and tribesmen from its 1947 incursion and "pending a final solution, the territory evacuated by the Pakistani troops will be administered by local authorities under the surveillance of the Commission". Pakistan's puppet governments have always run Azad Kashmir, and a series of resolutions passed by Pakistan's National Assembly ensures Azad Kashmir is legally and strategically cemented to Pakistan, as much as the rest of PoK, which Pakistan administers as "Northern Areas". Kashmir has become so central to Pakistan's stated policy that it even instituted the post of minister for Kashmir affairs-not a sign of a nation that is about to aid the configuring of Jammu and Kashmir "in accordance with the will of the people", as the UN resolution directs India and Pakistan.

Equally, India has steadfastly prevented a referendum to let the people of Jammu & Kashmir decide what they want to do. In reply to the letter of ruler of Kashmir Hari Singh requesting military help from the Government of India against Pakistan, governor-general Lord Mountbatten inserted a time-bomb of a caveat in his letter of October 27, 1947, "... in the case of any state where the issue of accession has been the subject of dispute, the question of accession should be decided in accordance with the wishes of the people of the state, it is my Government's wish that, as soon as law and order have been restored in Kashmir and its soil cleared of the invader, the question of the state's accession should be settled by a reference to the people."

That has not happened. If there was a chance of the people of Kashmir Valley voting to form their own dominion or opting to go with Pakistan, it would open a can of worms. This is at the core of India's persistent argument that Kashmir is a bilateral issue between India and Pakistan and does not need or merit international mediation either by the UN or a third country. And this also explains the diplomatic victories India and Pakistan periodically claim, trumpeting that either Kashmir has "not been internationalised" or "internationalised".

The Pakistani establishment's long-time belligerence towards India has also hardened a feeling among a section of influential Indian policymakers and India's resurgent Hindutva hawks that increasingly Pakistan's leadership, driven by religious cohorts, exists to see the breaking up of India. This policy, they feel, is used by Pakistan because as essentially a failed state it has no recourse to survival except to ensure that its neighbour too becomes a failed state.

There are voices of reason on both sides. They counsel status quo and confidence building as a first step. With international eyes on India, it is clear that elections this October in Kashmir will need to be free and fair for winning credibility points. And to negate Pakistan's propaganda machine.

Equally, in Pakistan moderate voices counsel a return to dialogue as an effective Kashmir strategy. "Pakistani policymakers would have to pursue a proactive political and diplomatic strategy focused on Kashmir," Pakistan's former information minister Mushahid Hussain wrote recently in India Today. "It would have to fashion a policy that reverts to the pre-1989 position before insurgency in Kashmir."

His subtext, and that of numerous people on both sides of the border, is that it is well past the time economic development took precedence over policy that leads to a situation where each country has spent Rs 1 crore a day for the past 18 years defending inhospitable land around the Siachen Glacier, let alone the cost of arming forces, dealing with death and rebuilding shattered lives. Over and over again.

Thirty-six years ago in 1966, Indian prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri and Pakistan's President Mohammed Ayub Khan signed a document for peace in Tashkent. The Tashkent Declaration offered pure magic: "The Prime Minister of India and the President of Pakistan ... hereby declare their firm resolve to restore normal and peaceful relations between their countries and to promote understanding and friendly relations between their peoples. They consider the attainment of these objectives of vital importance for the welfare of the 600 million people of India and Pakistan."

India and Pakistan's population today is almost double. Both nations are widely regarded as corrupt, largely illiterate and poor. Peace is such a colossal no-brainer it's a wonder why the leaders of the two countries simply don't get it.